It is now two years since a working group set up under the direction of the French Institute of Navigation at the instance of the Secretariat d'Etat á la Marine Marchande delivered a report which was the fruit of a thirteen-months study of the various possibilities of bridge-automation for commercial shipping.

The terms of reference of this study embraced a ship all of whose essential functions were under the control of a central computer, the system, briefly including:

A dead reckoning loop (ship computer dialogue);

A heading speed conversion loop (officer computer dialogue);

An observation calculation loop (officer computer dialogue);

An anti-collision control loop (radar computer dialogue).

Naturally since this was a formal study, the most complete and complex case was examined, and the approximate cost of the data-handling equipment for such a ship was estimated to be of the order of two million francs.